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The flatworms known as planarians are neuroscience darlings. Their centralized brain, complex sensory abilities and rapid regenerative capacities make these nonparasitic worms ideal for studying the mechanisms that regulate stem cell function, neuronal development and limb regrowth. To this repertoire, scientists have now added a new trick: these invertebrates can store memories outside their brain and retrieve them after losing their head and growing a new one. Researchers at Tufts University tested the worms’ recall by leveraging a quirk of planarian behavior: worms that recognize a familiar locale will settle in to feed more quickly than planarians that find themselves in a new environment....

A year since a probe called Philae made history by touching down on a comet, the team that pulled off the feat is plotting a different kind of landing. Next September, the European Space Agency will crash Philae’s mothership Rosetta into the icy dust ball, but as gently as possible. The dramatic act will bring the mission to an abrupt end—and give Rosetta’s wealth of sensors and instruments their closest view of the comet yet....

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION In 1983 and 1984 scientists established that HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus) causes AIDS, which had recently begun cropping up in gay men in California and New York. The discovery quickly led to predictions that a preventive vaccine would soon be on tap. Similarly, in 1996, after powerful drug combinations began forcing HIV down to undetectable levels in the blood, prominent HIV researcher David D. Ho of the Rockefeller University voiced optimism that attacking the virus early and hard could prove curative....

From Nature magazine The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is perilously overbudget and under threat of cancellation, but Naturehas learned that it may be offered a financial lifeline. The flagship observatory is currently funded entirely through NASA’s science division; now NASA is requesting that more than US$1 billion in extra costs be shared 50:50 with the rest of the agency. The request reflects administrator Charles Bolden’s view, expressed earlier this month, that the telescope is a priority not only for the science programme, but for the entire agency....

We have heard the calls for communication trainings for scientists, part of the recent push to encourage scientists to pare down their extensive explanations into jargon-free digestible bites. In this way, we are told, scientists can speak science to nonscientific policy makers and to the public at large. But based on my research for my forthcoming book about evidence-based policy making in Congress, there is a key ingredient missing from this conversation....

Particle physicists love speed. They hope that, some years from now, they’ll have a brand-new machine capable of colliding particles stupefyingly fast—99.999999999 percent of the speed of light. Planning such a collider, though, has been a much slower process.* One contender is the International Linear Collider (ILC), a $7-billion, 20-kilometer-long machine that would be built in Japan. The ILC’s prospects have always been uncertain—a trend that continued last March, when Japanese officials announced that they would not commit to fund it....

TWO ARTICLES in June proved to be not only provocative but complementary. “Doubt Is Their Product,” by David Michaels, discussed efforts by corporations and interest groups to employ their own research to undermine the science supporting product regulation. Many readers suspected they had found an example of such intentionally generated uncertainty in “Obesity: An Overblown Epidemic,” W. Wayt Gibbs’s report on assertions by researchers that the government, medical establishment and media are misleading the public on the health consequences of rising body weight....

In an ordinary year, holiday angst is very real: Anxiety, depression and stress are all known to spike between Thanksgiving and the year’s end, as social engagements, travel and bills for holiday gifts simultaneously surge. Yet 2020 has been far from ordinary, so we must expect that this holiday season will be unusual. This year has been characterized by extremes. Health care faced a crisis of epic and dangerous proportions, yet medical innovation is at an all-time high....

Why Choose This Book? How We Make Decisions by Read Montague. Dutton, 2006 ($24.95) Your brain is a highly efficient choosing machine, a biological computer designed by evolution to make the best possible choices using the least possible resources. If you doubt it, just touch the top of your head. The fact that it is only warm and not hot, like the processor in your desktop computer, is testament to your brain’s efficiency....

Scientists have observed that reading ability scales with socioeconomic status. Yet music might help close the gap, according to Nina Kraus and her colleagues at Northwestern University. Kraus’s team tested the auditory abilities of teenagers aged 14 or 15, grouped by socioeconomic status (as indexed by their mother’s level of education, a commonly used surrogate measure). The researchers recorded the kids’ brain waves with EEG as they listened to a repeated syllable against soft background sound and when they heard nothing....

Malaria is such a problem globally, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, that the World Health Organization (WHO), together with other international AID organizations, launched the Roll Back Malaria campaign with a goal of halving the incidence of the disease by 2010. According to results published today in Nature, that task may be even more daunting than expected. The results indicate that there are nearly 50 percent more clinical cases of malaria worldwide than previous estimates suggested....

Much work on aging brains has focused on their failings, but two new studies look at how they succeed. In both a University of Michigan at Ann Arbor report on which brain regions respond to challenging tasks and a Johns Hopkins University look at older rats, researchers found that aging brains function differently than young brains. Cindy Lustig of Ann Arbor used functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe the brains of young adults (aged 18 to 30) and seniors (65 to 92) as they tackled simple and difficult mental exercises....

As they race to test an experimental coronavirus vaccine, researchers aren’t waiting to see how well it prevents infection in animals before trying it in people, breaking from the usual protocol. “I don’t think proving this in an animal model is on the critical path to getting this to a clinical trial,” said Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech that has produced a Covid-19 vaccine candidate at record speed....

A mysterious deep-ocean seaweed diverged from the rest of the green-plant family around 540 million years ago, developing a large body with a complex structure independently from all other sea or land plants. All of the seaweed’s close relatives are unicellular plankton. The finding, published today in Scientific Reports, upends conventional wisdom about the early evolution of the plant kingdom. “People have always assumed that within the green-plant lineage, all the early branches were unicellular,” says Frederik Leliaert, an evolutionary biologist at Ghent University in Belgium....

In the past few decades, researchers have opened up the extraordinary world of microbes living on and within the human body, linking their influence to everything from rheumatoid arthritis to healthy brain function. Yet we know comparatively little about the rich broth of microbes and chemicals in the air around us, even though we inhale them with every breath. This struck Stanford University genomics researcher Michael Snyder as a major knowledge gap, as he pursued long-term research that involved using biological markers to understand and predict the development of disease in human test subjects....

During the summer of 1963, when I was six years old, my family traveled from our home in Philadelphia to Los Angeles to visit my maternal relatives. I already knew my grandmother well: she helped my mother care for my twin brothers, who were only 18 months my junior, and me. When she was not with us, my grandmother lived with her mother, whom I met that summer for the first time....

After the first-ever explosion of an atomic bomb on July 16, 1945 near Socorro, N.M., J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, recited a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Less than a month later, a quarter of a million lives were lost to the technology created by the Manhattan Project: people vaporized, buildings torn to dust, survivors dying in agony weeks or months later....

By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) - U.S. teens report easy access to firearms, even when they have mental health problems that put them at an increased risk of suicide, according to a new study. Overall, 41 percent of teens who reported being in a home with a firearm had easy access to it. Among teens with a history of mental illness or suicidal acts, researchers found that percentage was the same....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. We throw the term “electrolyte” around a lot these days and most of us have a vague notion of what it means. But how much do you really know about electrolytes? I’ve gotten several questions on this topic lately so today’s show is a crash course on electrolytes: exactly what they are, what they do for you, how much you need, and where to get them....

WASHINGTON—The White House’s commission on combating the opioid epidemic has recommended that President Trump declare a federal state of emergency to address the crisis, a potentially significant step for an administration that has repeatedly pledged to take steps to ease the epidemic. “The first and most urgent recommendation of this Commission is direct and completely within your control. Declare a national emergency under either the Public Health Service Act or the Stafford Act,” the committee wrote in an interim report released Monday....